When South Africa announced in 2003 that it would compete to build the world’s largest radio telescope, the multibillion-dollar Square Kilometre Array, the international community was sceptical. Could an African nation pull off such a project? They had not counted on radio astronomer and political activist Bernie Fanaroff, who tells Anil Ananthaswamy how his team positioned South Africa at the front of the race to build the telescope.
Why is the Square Kilometre Array so important to cosmology?
It will be a couple of orders of magnitude more sensitive than existing radio telescopes. It will enable cosmologists to map
